You may as well leave the porch light on for Harold Holt if you're waiting for these guys to remake Gothic 1/2. They did it with Risen 1, the rest have been garbage. Elex has two debilitating problems due to poor design and execution. The result is that PB has finally torn their legacy, and they will not be able to rise to those achievements again. We are talking 20 years ago,. They are not the company they were, and do not have enough understanding of their own games to rise to it again. They have some good programmers for a lower tier studio, but their direction is at fault, and these are the same owners who have been pumping out poorly designed games for a long time now. Gothic 1/2 is brilliant, and works so well as the design is self-consistent. Combat is clunky but simple and reliable. Progression through the environment is gated by high level non-scaling enemies. This forces the game along a semi-linear path, and allows for a narrative and a gratifying sense of unfolding exploration. Gothic 3 was an open world bun fight with broken combat, and the later Risen's were a piratey mess. Elex is sold as a return to the roots. The design is now open world, but the open world is littered with high level non-scaling enemies. As a result you can't explore it without getting randomly ganked by some critter. Players get around this at low level by exploiting the AI and running past creatures, and at high level just obliterate them. This is a complete failure of design. It is not fun to kite mobs, and the exploration is just not fun as a result. Any halfway sensible open-world game either gates high level areas, or scales enemies so exploration and progression maintains a satisfying level of challenge. It is beyond me how they could adopt this as a design choice, and I don't think they did. I think they simply took the Gothic 1/2 design, made it open world, and this mess is the result. The design is not self-consistent, and the gameplay is conceptually broken as a result. It's sort of bastard child of Fallout-SkyrimGothic, but these games have grossly dissimilar design choices, and they can't be put together in a manner that is self-consistent or fun to play. The other serious problem is the interminable and unending dialogue. Every little quest requires excessive dialogue, and the characters routinely repeat themselves using slightly different words! I'm not joking. The characterisation is poor, but it never used to matter as it was such a small part of the original games. In this one, these conversations are everywhere - they are unending. Questing is distinctly unenjoyable as a result. You start to dread the conversations! This is a PB game. I thought if they don't totally stuff the combat and just remake Gothic 2, they are sweet. Who would have thought a PB game would be basically unplayable due to interminable dialogue! It is bizarre, and game-breaking. Along with the other design choices, it is a real sad state of affairs. It's pointless now to wait for them to remake G1/G2. It's the past, unfortunately. Level progression is exceptionally slow, but this is secondary to the broken encounter design and the deeply unsatisfying 'combat' of running around creatures. People want to progress past that. If the game world was self-consistent it wouldn't really matter. The combat system comes under a lot of criticism. I agree with the person who said the addition of the stamina bar was unhelpful. It is basically G2 with a stamina limiting your attacks and movements, and it's not an improvement. It appears to be typical PB now, not really having any understanding of whether adding a gameplay element actually adds to the game, and just shoving it in anyway. But hey, this is from the makers of Gothic 3, and the combat system there truly was broken. That wasn't an early release issue, they had 3 years, it's just PB being unable to iteratively progress on their original formula. So much so they break it? Boggle the mind really, but they did. The animation comes under universal criticism. I have no idea why. It is uniformly excellent, especially the creatures. It appears the criticism is they're not mo-capped (or at least not with modern techniques, G2 was mo-capped), but it doesn't really detract too much from it. Finally, the environmental design was chosen deliberately, but it is jarring and non-sensical. It's all a bit fruity and hard to swallow. I guess this was their take on post-apocalyptic high fantasy, and it's a combination that's rarely seen for a reason. Bit hard to believe it, as its so comical.
